More on Children of Men

Media Mindfulness has a little piece on Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. AV and I saw the film a couple of Saturdays ago and were blown away at it on a variety of levels. I'm particularly interested in the notions of realism that the film embodies (as realism in film is oddly turning into my pet project -- and probably thesis focus), and I appreciate the article's discussion of that idea -- as well as the quotation from Zizek that explodes the idea little more. He says, "The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here."

Part of what makes it credible, I think, is the film's direct, but not brow-beating reliance on familiar themes and images -- the war on terror taken to a horrific (but logical) extension. It doesn't take much for the viewer to build credible inferences between the world around us and the world on screen. This is why I think it is so much more effective as a morality play and a science fiction nightmare than Blade Runner. I suppose this inference goes without saying, but I want to argue that w/r/t Children of Men and elsewhere, our ability to build inferences between the real world and the world we see is what makes film so powerful and effective as a genre of moral texts. Hmm.

Read Manolha Dargis's review.